Video: How ILM Made Battleship Look Cooler Than a Board Game

To get those mightily fluid extraterrestrial ships to float, Battleship’s filmmakers enlisted the help of Industrial Light & Magic. The making-of clip above, which comes from the film’s upcoming DVD release, breaks down just how ILM’s visual effects whizzes made those alien craft look so cool in the waters of the Pacific.

“We knew we had to create a whole new water system at ILM — a new way of directing water and simulating water and being able to render it in very real ways,” ILM visual effects supervisor Grady Cofer says in the video.

To do that, the VFX house created masses of digital blue water for director Peter Berg’s film, then built whitecaps, mist and splashes out of digitally rendered mass until the water was fully realized. ILM also went to great lengths to create each of the alien ships and give them a unique color palette that would make them stand out in a given scene.

“It’s interesting to kind of see how this nugget of some idea with a lot of R&D and a lot of render time really kind of led to one of the most visually arresting shots in the movie,” Cofer says of the film’s massive spaceship flyover scene.

And hey, they definitely made it look cooler than an animated board game.

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